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Old Posted Sep 21, 2019, 11:28 PM
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Yuri Yuri is offline
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How much a city can grow?

I thought of this thread more as a reflection about present urban areas and whether there is a physical limit on how much a (monocentric) city can grow and still working as a same labour market.

World's largest city is Tokyo, a "monocentric" metro area. In the future, it could be surpassed by Jakarta or New Delhi, both with the same characteristic. Emerging Chinese metropolises, on the other hand, would work differently, be it on the Pearl River Delta ou on the metro areas around Shanghai. Both regions work more as a big Rhein-Ruhr area, a collection of metropolises instead of a gargantuan metropolis.

In South America, São Paulo is transitioning from this Tokyo-model into a Pearl River Delta one:



The "Macrometropolis" (a term more and more common) has about 33 million people and growing at a 10% decade rate. Even though São Paulo is the star, it's not big enough to turn Campinas metro area (3 million people) into a mere suburb, even though they touch each other by continuous urban development through Jundiaí and its suburbs and working on a complementary way (Campinas-Jundiaí-Sorocaba triangle absorbing São Paulo's manufacturing and logistic flight, stopping them to move to other parts of the country avoiding a Rust Belt phenomenon).

New York and Philadelphia might be a similar case, even though, they are distinct and have their own worlds. At least in São Paulo's case, all the areas are inside the same state and share the same cultural traits.

Anyway, can we have a 50 million, a 60 million "monocentric" urban area or Tokyo's 38-40 million is a physical limit for it? What are your thoughts?
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